The Golden Bowl, the Higher Creative Center

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth … [when] they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." – Ecclesiastes 12:5-7.

In terms of human geography, metaphorically man's body is divided into three symbolic areas — the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, and the Land of Egypt. The Garden of Eden includes the head and the cervical spine, composed of seven cervical vertebrae, and terminates just above the level of the shoulders. The Promised Land includes the stomach, lungs and heart plus the thyroid and parathyroid glands in the neck. The Land of Egypt includes everything below the diaphragm, the the entire abdomen, legs, and feet.

From ancient time, the golden bowl has been a metaphor for man's head, the skull, the brain, and everything it contains. It is the soul's physical instrument for the real and perfect expression of Mind, Substance, and Power. Gold is the most precious metal known to man from antiquity, and is thus the most fitting of receptacles for God's most precious gift to man, that mind which was in Christ Jesus. The golden bowl is also called the higher creative center. Your golden bowl contains the pineal body, pituitary gland, and the glandlike parathalamus structures. The symbol ∘X∘ represents the optic chiasma of the thalamus, and the left and right parathalamus glands. The optic chiasma registers the Light from above, and every embodied soul must develop this ability.

Edna Lister on the Golden Bowl, the Higher Creative Center

Gird your loins before speaking; take a deep breath and tighten your abdominal muscles. Then pour out love as you speak the Word, while firmly holding the reins for Power to use you. – Edna Lister, February 16, 1951.

Cleansing taints from the golden bowl is difficult. The Power that passes through your Oversoul star returns directly to the Source. However, you must return the Power that you have invoked for the world or misused. Gather it together with arms of Light into a cloud for its first purification, then into a shaft of fire to ascend through altars into the original emanations to purify it for healing and for the final enfolding. – Edna Lister, January 25, 1970.

In the beautiful and affecting description of the body of man suffering under the infirmities of old age given in the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes, we find the expression "or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern: then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it." Doctor Clarke thus explains these beautiful metaphors. The silver cord is the spinal marrow; its loosening is the cessation of all nervous sensibility; the golden bowl is the brain, which is rendered unfit to perform its functions by the approach of death; the pitcher means the great vein which carries the blood to the right ventricle of the heart, here called the fountain; by the wheel is meant the great artery which receives the blood from the left ventricle of the heart, here designated as the cistern. This collection of metaphors … forms an appropriate introduction to those sublime ceremonies whose object is to teach symbolically the resurrection and life eternal. – Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry